A function for downloading data stored on GitHub in a plain-text format (e.g. CSV, TSV) into R. The function loads the data as a data frame. For more details see: http://christophergandrud.blogspot.com/2013/01/sourcegithubdata-simple-function-for.html.

source_GitHubData.R

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# R function for downloading plain-text data from GitHub
# Christopher Gandrud
# 7 January 2013
#####################

# source_GitHubData is directly based on source_url from the Hadley Wickham's devtools package

source_GitHubData <-function(url, sep = ",", header = TRUE)
{
  require(httr)
  request <- GET(url)
  stop_for_status(request)
  handle <- textConnection(content(request, as = 'text'))
  on.exit(close(handle))
  read.table(handle, sep = sep, header = header)
}